Laura Wright 
Few women in the history of colonial South America acquired a reputation as terrible as that of Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer.
Better known as La Quintrala, Catalina was a wealthy seventeenth-century Chilean landowner whose name became synonymous with cruelty, murder, torture and even witchcraft. Stories eventually credited her with dozens of killings and described her as a beautiful, red-haired monster who terrorized servants and tenants while using her family’s wealth and influence to escape justice.
Some of those accusations have roots in historical records.
Others belong to legend.
After more than three centuries, separating the two has become remarkably difficult.
Who Was La Quintrala?
Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer was born around 1604 into one of the wealthiest and most influential families of colonial Chile.
Her ancestry reflected the complicated society that developed following the Spanish conquest. Her family included Spanish, German and Indigenous ancestry, and the Lisperguers possessed considerable land, wealth and political influence. Catalina eventually became a substantial landowner herself.
She also developed a dreadful reputation.
According to later accounts, Catalina was strikingly beautiful, with red hair that became one of the defining features of her legend. Even the origin of her nickname remains uncertain. One explanation connects Quintrala with the red-flowered quintral plant. Another suggests it developed from a diminutive form of Catalina.
Whatever its origin, the name eventually became infamous.
Murder in the Family
One of the earliest serious accusations against Catalina involved the death of her own father.
In 1622, Catalina’s paternal aunt accused her of poisoning him while he was ill. Despite the accusation, Catalina was never prosecuted for his death.
Later stories transformed the episode into one of the foundational crimes of La Quintrala’s murderous career.
But accusation is not conviction.
That distinction becomes important throughout her story.
Another notorious case concerned the death of a prominent man who had reportedly visited Catalina. She was implicated in his killing, but one of her enslaved servants was ultimately blamed and executed.
Once again, Catalina emerged untouched.
Was she innocent?
Was someone else sacrificed for her crime?
Or did the power of her family make determining the truth almost impossible?
Those questions have followed her ever since.
The People Who Worked Her Land
The darkest and most substantial accusations concerned Catalina’s treatment of the people under her authority.
Historical records contain allegations of serious violence and abuse against servants, enslaved people and workers associated with her estates. Eventually, authorities investigated claims that people under Catalina’s control had been subjected to brutal treatment and even killed. Chile’s National Archive describes her as having been accused and tried in connection with more than forty murders.
That does not mean forty murders were ever proven.
The distinction is easily lost when the legend is retold.
What does appear clear is that Catalina’s reputation for cruelty existed during her own lifetime. This wasn’t simply a horror story invented centuries after her death. Seventeenth-century judicial records already contain narratives of scandal and violence associated with her. Modern scholarship has traced important elements of the later La Quintrala legend directly into surviving colonial proceedings from the 1630s.
Something was happening.
Exactly how much is considerably harder to determine.
The Woman Who Couldn’t Be Touched
Wealth and family influence are recurring elements in Catalina’s history.
Her relatives occupied important positions, and later accounts repeatedly alleged that these connections helped protect her from serious consequences. The National Library of Chile notes that despite the numerous accusations made against her, she escaped punishment.
That naturally contributed to the legend.
If people believed a wealthy landowner was abusing or killing those beneath her while authorities repeatedly failed to punish her, La Quintrala would have become frightening without requiring a single supernatural embellishment.
But embellishments came anyway.
Witchcraft and the Devil
As Catalina’s reputation grew, ordinary human cruelty apparently ceased to be enough.
Stories associated her with witchcraft and even with the Devil.
Some of these traditions also became entangled with stories about other women in the Lisperguer family, who themselves had been accused of extraordinary crimes and diabolical practices.
This is where considerable caution is necessary.
Accusations of witchcraft against powerful, unconventional or despised women are hardly unusual in historical sources. Nor does an accusation of diabolism establish that someone actually practiced anything resembling what later storytellers imagined.
But once Catalina became La Quintrala, witchcraft fitted the character perfectly.
The landowner became a murderess.
The murderess became a torturer.
The torturer became a witch.
Eventually, history had created a monster.
Forty Murders?
The number forty became firmly attached to La Quintrala.
It remains commonly repeated that she murdered approximately forty people or was accused of more than forty murders. Chile’s National Archive itself notes accusations and judicial proceedings involving more than forty killings.
But that should not be read as a confirmed body count.
Historical accusations, testimony, judicial allegations and later folklore are not interchangeable with proven murders. Some crimes attributed to Catalina may have occurred. Others may have been exaggerated, distorted or attached to her reputation afterward.
Once someone becomes infamous enough, stories have a tendency to find them.
And La Quintrala had centuries in which to accumulate stories.
The Making of a Monster
A particularly important chapter in the development of her modern reputation came long after Catalina’s death.
In 1877, Chilean historian Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna published Los Lisperguer y la Quintrala, drawing upon historical documents while helping establish the version of Catalina that became embedded in popular culture.
Later writers developed the character further. Magdalena Petit’s twentieth-century novel La Quintrala, for example, incorporated familiar ideas about female sexuality, criminality and diabolism that helped perpetuate the legendary image. Chile’s National Library specifically notes the prejudicial ideas about women present in these literary treatments.
For that reason, some modern interpretations have attempted to rehabilitate Catalina completely, presenting her as a powerful and independent woman demonized by a patriarchal society.
That explanation may also go too far.
The uncomfortable truth lies somewhere between the extremes.
Catalina did not emerge from nothing. Serious accusations against her existed during her lifetime, and surviving colonial documents demonstrate that stories of violence and scandal were already circulating around her centuries before the later novels appeared.
But neither can every lurid story subsequently attributed to her be accepted unquestioningly as history.
The Death of La Quintrala
Catalina died in January 1665.
Her surviving testament provides an intriguing final glimpse of the real woman beneath the legend. It concerned not only the distribution of her considerable property but also religious provisions intended for the salvation of her soul. The document survives today in Chile’s National Archive.
That doesn’t absolve her of anything.
Nor does it prove that the terrible stories were true.
It merely reminds us that the woman who actually lived was considerably more complicated than the monster who survived her.
History or Legend?
Was La Quintrala one of the great female murderers of history?
Possibly not in the form popular legend remembers her.
Was she simply an innocent woman whose independence frightened a patriarchal society?
The surviving accusations make that explanation difficult to accept as well.
There is enough historical evidence surrounding Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer to suggest that her reputation for violence cannot simply be dismissed as a later invention. There is also enough mythology, literary embellishment and cultural prejudice surrounding her to make the traditional portrait of a beautiful, red-haired, satanic serial killer equally questionable.
Somewhere underneath La Quintrala was Catalina.
We can still find pieces of her in court records, accusations, family histories and her final testament.
But more than three hundred years of legend stand between us and the woman herself.
Perhaps that is why La Quintrala remains so fascinating.
There was almost certainly something behind the legend. We simply no longer know exactly how much.
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